Soul of a Dragon
by kjanuary
Summary: NOTE: Chapters 3 and 4 have been switched. An ongoing string of one-shots, exploring what it must have been like for the heroes to share the soul of a creature as old as time, and mostly insane. Completed: Albert, Dart as Divine Dragoon, Miranda, Shana.
1. Albert: The Jade Dragoon

[A/N: Very mild spoiler for Disk 2. The first of several oneshots, trying to get inside the heads of the heroes once the soul of a dragon has taken up residence.]

* * *

THE JADE DRAGOON

To the spirit of the Jade Dragon, existence meant desire. Hunger and thirst it felt, so loudly that Albert had difficulty remembering he had only a human-sized stomach plagued with a draconic appetite. But there were other desires, too, which he had not predicted. It longed for treasure, for power, for things to possess and lives to command. It counted loaves of bread and blades of grass. It was insatiably curious.

Albert satisfied its ravening, for the most part. Lying awake at night, feeling the dragon collecting stars through his eyes, he understood Greham the traitor. Greham's lusts--for glory, for money, for his comrade the hero--must have been fodder for Feyrbrand's own needs. In the end he was killed by his wanting. But Albert did not only want, Albert had, and that kept the soul inside him quiet.

He wondered what Lavitz had desired.

Only occasionally did the Jade Dragon cause him trouble. Want, it would whisper (although of course it did not use words) as the Dragon passed a merchant's stall in Donau. Any shiny trinket could set it off. No, Albert reminded them both, I have--we have--better. He imagined the treasuries of Serdio to make it hush.

Want, it hissed as the old librarian's voice creaked over old legends, and Albert listened raptly until no more questions could be answered.

One time--it must have been in Kazas, with the dragon still settling into his slender frame--it murmured want so quietly that Albert did not notice. The dragon numbered the hairs on Shana's head, brows, eyelashes; traced the contours of her soft body in the breezes passing by, all without a single conscious thought from the king.

Even unaware, he must have given some sign, some shift in pulse or posture. He knew that only because Dart suddenly moved between them, possibly equally unaware that he did so. From his Dragoon spirit, though, came a lash of heat that said in no uncertain terms to the hungering spirit of the Jade Dragon, not yours. Albert felt terribly embarrassed for days.

Then the day came when Albert's heart and the dragon's soul converged on a single desire, strong as a hurricane. He looked across a warped pool of magic, bristling at the Wingly taint, at the first perfect creature he had ever seen: hair like silk, skin like velvet, dainty hands and feet and heartbeat slow and steady as the ocean tides. In that moment, treasure, kingdom, wisdom, and power all became trash. Want, said the dragon, and Albert agreed.

* * *

[A/N: The answer to the Lavitz question is "A world where people can smile," according to Kaiser, if you visit him after the raze of Deningrad.]


	2. Dart: Divinity's Price

[A/N: Spoilers for endgame. The idea came from watching the ending cinematics, in which Dart, in Divine Dragoon form, has clearly been warped out of normal human proportions by the possession. That had to leave aftereffects.]

* * *

DIVINITY'S PRICE

After the Second Dragon Campaign and for the rest of his life, Dart Feld ached. He avoided doctors. What could they do? Solace came in the company of his friends, in weeklong escapes to Shirley's shrine--empty now, but still resonant with the long-dead Dragoon's tender purity--or simply in lying in Shana's lap, feeling her heart beat. He memorized the constellations of tiny burn scars on her arms.

"My moon," he called her, and she shivered.

What could doctors do for a man infected with the soul of destruction itself? His bones ached to the marrow; his joins stiffened; his skin peeled as if perpetually sunburned. He resembled his father more every day, although it took a visit to Albert to notice.

Dart's eyes no longer functioned properly. Colors warped out of recognition, details smudged at times and intensified at others, and he felt half blind, always turning to see beside and behind him. He saw blues and purples in cool places and fiery red at the core of men and beasts. Only Shana remained clear, a figure in silvery white that burned and soothed him simultaneously.

And what good were powders and pills to this? Even Miranda and her Sacred Sisters could do nothing for him. The Divine dragon's tempestuous, captive soul guarded him jealously, master and slave.

He never told the other Dragoons what happened inside of him when the spirit of the Divine Dragon took him. The echoes twisted his dreams, sent him out hunting far from people, hunting to quell and numb the terrible urges inside of him and that voice he should not here.

There lay the terror--for the Divine Dragon spoke to him, not as the other dragons did in emotions and images, or the Red-Eyed Dragon in pulses of warmth. There came deliberate thoughts. For millennia, no one had considered the possibility of any dragon possessing sentience; it was inconceivable. Yet the Divine Dragon, for all its blind rage, contained all the intelligence needed for a rational being. Only its draconic insanity stood in the way.

Mine, mine, he still heard in his nightmares, the word that came to him and he took the radiant spirit and felt something terrible and alien rush into his core. His blood froze, his bones turned to fire. The Red-Eyed Dragon had strengthened his body; the Divine Dragon claimed it. Mine, he heard, as his bones lengthened and warped out of shape, as his armor fused to his flesh and piled on itself like coral, as he looked out at the world through the King of Dragons' seven eyes and felt chaos and desolation in his soul.


	3. Miranda: Addiction

[A/N: I couldn't see the soul of the White-Silver Dragon being "insane" in the same way as the rest... maybe just in the quietly unhinged way of a mother who has lost her child. And, like that mother, would do anything to make her child happy and want to stay with her.]

* * *

ADDICTION

Miranda had expected chaos, bloodlust, nausea; all the symptoms that the other Dragoons reported experiencing when they allowed the dragon's soul to take over. She had not expected peace.

The transformation itself was like the very instant of giving birth: a vicious, tearing pain that seemed about to rend her in two, followed at once by an overwhelming sense of serenity, almost—but not quite—joy. As dawning light, beaming forth from her own body, coalesced into paper-light armor and great golden wings, she felt warm. It was as if some invisible mother had just wrapped her in wondrous, shielding arms. She did not want to ever be let go.

As the White-Silver Dragoon, she saw the world differently. Darkness and distance meant nothing anymore, mere human limitations that held no sway over a dragon's surreal power. Wherever she turned her eyes, she saw with the detail and precision of a microscope. She could see the sweat beading on the faces of sailors on vessels still leagues out to see. On her night watches, she could see a night owl on silver wings swoop down to snatch up its mousy dinner, on the verge of a wood ten miles distant. When she gazed upon her new companions, she could count the hairs on their heads and watch the faint glimmer of a beating pulse in the hollows of their throats.

Transformed, made new, she never missed with her bow. Neither did she feel worry, or anger, or disappointment. She was only soothed and calm and, in a way, numb. She hated coming out again, always to half-blind eyes that ached and a head that throbbed. Afterwards, she grew cranky, snapping at the slightest annoyance; she knew she was being a bitch, but it was better than sobbing for the empty desolation and abandonment she felt in the dragon's absence.

She argued with Dart—trying not to beg—for the right to take the front line in battles. "No," he always said, "you should stay in the back where you won't get hurt. If we need you, we'll shout."

"I'm not Shana," she snarled back. "Don't try to protect me."

That made Dart's eyes narrow, and the others bit their lips to hold back what they were so obviously thinking. Bitch, Miranda thought for them, and didn't dispute it, but she didn't know how to explain. All that she knew was that she needed battle and the threat of harm to awaken the soul of the dragon, and she was desperate for it.

Weeks passed before she finally acknowledged, deep inside herself, that she was addicted.


	4. Shana: Farewell, Heaven

[A/N: Endgame Spoilers. Torn between posting this as "Shana's Chapter" or as a story of its own... I decided to just leave it as a chapter, and revisit some of the concepts in a fuller piece later. Also, if you tilt your head and squint while reading this, you'll come up with a frighteningly logical crack pairing...]

* * *

FAREWELL, HEAVEN

"My body's too weak," she had told her friends in Deningrad, the words echoing in that voice left behind by the spirit of the White Dragon in its sudden, unprecedented rejection.

For all she had struggled to overcome her body's frailty—running with Kongol at night, conditioning her muscles with Haschel, not complaining even when she passed out or vomited or lay awake crying at night, unable to sleep for the ache and for the discouragement of every day spent watching Dart, Rose, Albert, even little Meru splatter monsters and run on ahead—for all of that, it had not been enough. She would always be left behind. Miranda, tall as a man, with her valkyrie eyes—she could run beside them.

That was what Shana had told them.

It was too late now to go back and say what she had really meant, what she feared—that the Dragoon Spirit had finally lost the battle with that other, even more terrifying presence within her. She knew why Emperor Doel's men had razed and butchered an entire town to take her; why the dying Virage had reached out to grasp her, blind with need and confusion rather than rage; even why the Divine Dragon had leveled the Crystal Palace in an attempt to bury her in its ruins. That presence, that aching and poisonous light, would not let her be harmed. Neither would it consent to share her.

Of course the knowledge came too late. Her one small body was too weak to contain the war between Dragoon and Virage. She was no longer able to answer Shirley's call.

Now she would have given anything to feel that ceaseless battle of wills inside of her again. She would have tagged after Dart, forever the weak one, forever the little sister, rather than face this complete abandonment. She was alone, save for that terrifying and triumphant stirring within.

***

_In the echoing ruins of Vellweb, the man in red armor stares down without blinking, something alien and dead behind his pale blue eyes. Standing barefoot, Shana comes only to the middle of his chest._

_When he reaches for her, she fights the way Haschel taught her, fending him away with elbows and the flat hard sides of her hands. She knows how to twist out of his grasp. He tolerates her resistance for a few minutes before simply laying his hand on her head. A bolt of magic rattles through her entire body, the likes of which she has never felt. Her muscles surrender. She crumples at his feet, trembling, unable to even raise her head._

_He grasps her wrists together in one iron hand and with the other searches her body for scars, imperfections. The Dragon's spirit has mended scarless all but one: that burn left by the white heat of its passing, leaving a red mark like a waxing moon on her breast. He touches it lightly at first, almost reverently, then claims it with a sharp gouge from his clawlike nails. A trickle of blood runs down her white skin. She lies paralyzed, fighting to stop the tears from leaking free._

"_Moon Child," he calls her._

_***  
_

Sometimes, the other Dragoons spoke of the madness that crept into their minds when they channeled the monstrous souls that were bound to their own. Happy Haschel grew somber and grim. Dart crackled with leftover fire, his normal impetuousness turned into something more wild, a passion for battle and bloodshed that alarmed her. Becoming a Dragoon was like going insane, Rose had told them. It was the sacrifice required of them.

The White Dragon did not torment Shana the way the other spirits did. Its presence inside her was soothing—almost to the point of numbing. When she transformed and saw the world through its eyes, the world became simpler, divided into those whom she loved and must protect, and those who threatened them.

Even when the Dragon's power rained brilliant destruction down upon their enemies, it did so without malice. It did simply what was required to preserve other lives. And if Shana took a blow, so much the better that she suffer and bleed than the others. She thought of its soul as that of a mother—not harmless, but gentle in what madness it did have.

The Dragoons also suffered nightmares; at least one of them woke screaming on any given night. The nightmares she understood. The millennia-dead White Dragon dreamed of torture, murder, the screams of the innocent, and utter black isolation. When Shana dreamed, she cried.

Afterwards, always, the same spirit which had savaged her dreams with its own fears was there to comfort her again, the warm glow of a rising sun to chase away the ghosts of moonlight.

***

_When he is done, he simply sits back on his heels, studying her with those dead eyes. Shana is in control of her body again, for what little good it does her. She curls up to hide her nakedness. _

_His smile is like Dart's, if someone locked Dart in a prison, tortured him for eleven thousand years, killed all of his friends, cut out his heart, and then told him a joke. "So weak and fragile," he says. "I have never understood why Soa created humans. He must find you entertaining in some way."_

_He reaches out and rakes his nails through her hair, lifting her head. "Why are you the one who was chosen? What is there in this pathetic little body that drew the Virage's soul to you?" His hand slides down to her neck, pressing until she just starts to choke. "I have swatted your kind like flies."_

_Shana squirms away, gasping for breath. He lets her, knowing she cannot go far. Out in this wasteland, there is no one for her to run to, no one to help. Dart will not come for her this time._

"_You Dragoons are deluding yourselves, thinking that Fate is something you can just play with," he says. "The God of Destruction will arise to cleanse the world. It has already begun, and now I will see it through."_

"_I won't let you," she whispers._

"_Moon Child, you were born for this reason and no other." He stands, a red pillar of dead flame, herald and instrument of Fate. "And you are the biggest fool of all, for thinking you could ever be one of them."_

_***  
_

Her friends had been taken from her, and the White Dragoon had abandoned her. The war had been lost. Shana's soul was a lost cause, her heart broken.

From the day that Dart appeared in the door of that cell in Hellena Prison, still with the nimbus of battleglow about him, she wanted to be strong enough to stand beside him. Even as a Dragoon, however, she could not; Fate seemed determined that she would remain in the vanguard, tagging after him, to patch up the wounds only after the fighting was done.

Now she was to outstrip them all—to become a monster the likes of which the world had never seen. Even Rose would fear her, the Virage Embryo. Shana would stand alone and survey the smoking ember she had made of the earth, and finally there would be no one to leave her behind. There would be no one else at all.


End file.
